Making Homemade Tabasco Pepper Sauce (Part One)

We have grown many types of peppers in our garden, including jalapenos, banana, bell peppers (purple, gold, chocolate and green), cayenne, and criolla sella.  One pepper that we've never grown before is the Tabasco Pepper.  We do use McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce though.  I like it on red beans and rice and rice & gravy. Earlier this Spring, Tricia was picking up some feed at the Feed Store in town and the proprietor gave her a couple Tabasco Pepper plants. What a deal!  So I planted them in the garden and they have thrived!  They are both about three feet tall and absolutely covered in beautiful peppers that light up the garden.

Tabasco peppers at various stages of ripeness

The photo below shows the full color spectrum of the peppers, from green to yellow to orange to deep red.  When they are the deepest red color, it is time to harvest them.  We pick them, pulling off the stem and green cap and bring them inside.

Beautiful Tabasco peppers

These peppers are the same peppers that are indigenous to Mexico and South America and were brought to Avery Island, Louisiana by Mr. McIlhenny to make the famous Tabasco Sauce.  They make a mash of the ripened peppers, add a little salt that is mined from beneath Avery Island, add some vinegar and then allow the mash to age for 3 years in oak barrels.

I thought it would be fun to make our own Tabasco Sauce!  We picked the ripened peppers and brought them inside and cleaned them, making sure not to put our fingers anywhere around our eyes as these little boogers are hot!

Tabasco Peppers, cleaned

I chopped up the peppers on a cutting board.  You could smell the "heat" in the air.

Chopped Peppers

I added the chopped peppers to a saucepan along with a cup and a half of white vinegar and some salt and brought the mixture to a boil.

Salting the mash

Once it started to boil, I turned the heat back and let it simmer for 10 minutes.

Simmer down!

I got a potato masher and thoroughly mashed up the mixture to release all the flavor and color.  Then I pulled the saucepan off of the stove top and let it cool to room temperature.

Cooling down

We spooned the Tabasco pepper mash into the food processor and pureed it for a little while until it became a liquid.  I just love the coloration of this - such a bright red!

Red Hot!

There are many different types of pepper sauce.  My Grandmother, that we affectionately called Bumby, always called pepper sauce "Red Hot," regardless the brand.  You can tell by the photo why one might call it that!

I poured the pureed pepper mash into a tall quart sized freezer jar that we'll use to steep or age our Tabasco Sauce in instead of an oak barrel. It fit into the container just perfectly.

Jar almost filled

Instead of aging it for three years, we'll age it for 3 weeks in the fridge.  I dated the mash so that we'll know when it is ready.

Aging Pepper Sauce

Then I placed it on the top shelf of the refrigerator where it will sit and age until November 1st.

Cold Storage for a HOT Sauce

We'll show you Step 2 of our process in making Homemade Tabasco Sauce during the first week of November along with a taste test and review of the product.  This was a fun experiment and I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out.